


The Show?

by HigharollaKockamamie



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: M/M, conservation platform, gratuitous Pink Floyd lyrics, phantom cigar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-18
Updated: 2016-09-18
Packaged: 2018-08-15 16:44:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8064103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HigharollaKockamamie/pseuds/HigharollaKockamamie
Summary: For VKaz Week 2016 Day 7: Can You Hear Me? Kaz and Venom smoke a cigar, listen to prog rock, and talk about somebody they once knew.





	

The orange sun was almost weak enough for his eyes to beat. He kept the glasses on anyway. Every movement now was a Rubix cube of balance, from hauling the helicopter door open without losing his hold on his crutch to sitting on the thrumming metal floor and pushing himself out onto the landing. Kaz kept his balance through the impact that jarred what was left of his knee and made him grit his teeth, and allowed himself a shred of pride for that.  

“Call when you’re ready for pick-up, sir,” said Pequod’s voice over the radio.

The helicopter lifted away and left him in the conservation platform’s quiet. It smelled like grass and livestock, along with the scent of salt and sea that Kaz had stopped noticing, except in those times when it broke through and his senses reminded him that a slab on stilts in the middle of the ocean wasn’t the only place he’d ever lived. A sheep came up to the edge of the grassy enclosure and looked at him with incurious eyes. Kaz clanked and swayed past.

His cigar wouldn’t have a telltale scent on the breeze or burn a point of red in the twilight. What Kaz followed was the music.

He was sitting down in the pen resting his red arm across his knees, with a goat cropping the grass on one side and a cassette player laying on the other. He had come here most evenings when he was home, ever since he found out.

“Boss,” Kaz called, not really expecting an answer.

The goat’s ears flicked when V got up.

His metal arm steady around Kaz’s waist lifted him over the barrier.

The tape sang, _That space cadet glow._

Kaz said, “Can I join you?”

V folded back down onto the dirt and gestured at the empty place beside him. He had a hand for Kaz to lean on, on the way.

Kaz’s leg folded under him in the half of _seiza_  he had left. The goat watched him with his rectangle of a gaze, and went back to chewing the plant that towered over it. In the setting sun, shadow already protected the valley the pen made.

“Boss,” Kaz said, and didn’t have anything more to offer him.

V’s cigar didn’t give any sign that it was doing anything, besides the layer of haze it laid over his eyes. Two red fingers pinioned it, took it from his mouth, and held it out toward Kaz.

He nodded toward the plant the goat was nuzzling. “Wormwood,” he said. Yellow flowers dappled the shrub. “It’s in absinthe. This, too.”

“What does it feel like?” Kaz said.

V kept holding it out and inclined his head.

It felt strange and plasticine in Kaz’s fingers, and besides a faint bitterness, didn’t taste like much at all.

The guitar dipped and reeled, and the horizon dropped him down. The note lingered, and lingered. Kaz’s “Oh” mixed with it and the imagined echo of a woman’s voice.

He held the cigar out, and V took it from his fingers.

If it had been the kind the other man loved, he would have looked demonic in a red glow, with those scars and that piece of shrapnel he had. It was his, and didn’t interfere in any meaningful way with the last light of the low sun.

Kaz watched, and even with time going soft, couldn’t catch the right words in his fingers. It was V who gave him the way.

The music said, _And the sea may look warm to you babe._

V said, as the goat let him scratch between its horns, “Tell me someone you knew.”

He had a mercy that was as rare in this business as it was in the world. He handed him the cigar again first.

This time the bitterness made him think of salt water. The sun sank like jelly sliding down glass.

“Do you remember,” Kaz said, “That first group of volunteers we got in Costa Rica?”

“Yeah.” V breathed from the cigar with his eye shut.

Kaz said, “You and I were there when they got off the helicopter.”

The goat butted V’s hand. His thumb rubbed through the short fur. “They were looking at me. I could tell they were thinking _I thought he’d be taller_.”

A brown goat was meandering through the plants. The motion was strange, like a film reel that was missing pieces. “The paint on the base was still wet.”

“One of them stuck his hand in it. He looked so scared when he saw me looking at him, like he thought I was going to toss him overboard. I had to laugh. I told him he could work it off.”

“Is that where that thumbprint came from?” The swirl in the paint by the door had been there as long as Kaz could remember.

“Yeah. It was his.”

The lights were on, high above but closer than the stars. The plants swayed leaves in the breeze and flashed their glow back. Sheep’s voices carried faintly in the warm dark, and Kaz’s right hand loosened its aching fist.

The music went, _Snapshot in the family album._

Kaz said, “I knew a man who was always first in line.”

“That kind always has something to prove.”

The stars pulled their paths in streaks the color of old lace. Kaz leaned back on his hand. Venom’s shoulder shored the other side.

_Mother, should I trust the government?_

“Do you think,” V said, “he had any family?”

“I never saw him get any mail. A lot of them only had us.”

The cigar tasted like the batch of curry that was three tries from perfect.

Kaz said, “He must have been some kind of veteran. You don’t learn those skills just anywhere.”

V said, “Must have been.”

The impressionist painting around them had goats in different places every time he looked.

_Did did did did you see the frightened ones?_

V said, “I saw, once. He had scars we didn’t give him.”

Far off, raised on the walkway like a balcony, backlit, a thumb-sized soldier’s silhouette made its rounds. Between blinks he appeared on opposite corners.

The cigar tasted like the scent of the paper wrappers around the tobacco in his mother’s shop. He’d stolen one to try once and coughed himself sick.

The guitar picked up and danced into something that made his missing foot tap on the grass.  

_Who’s gonna show this stranger around?_

The scar on V’s lip broadened when he smiled. “He knew how he was going to die.”

“How?” said Kaz.

“Getting thrown in the ocean if you or me ever found the copy of the picture he kept hidden under his socks. It was that one with you on the beach.”

Kaz snorted a laugh that hummed past his lips and made the goat laying beside them raise its head. “I was such a vain little idiot I would have signed it.”

“He didn’t know you as well as I do.” He breathed in deep from the cigar. His eye crossed the blank territory of the eyepatch to look at Kaz. “He had a hell of a crush on you.”

The stars wrote music staff, lines in parallel.

_Do you think it’s time I stopped?_

Kaz said, “They were all pieces of home. I never saw him.”

“He was a name fit together by numbers. Cameras never put him in the center.”

The rest of the base held itself together with spokes, but his one was a liferaft out on its own. The spot of light over the rim of their horizon was either Mother Base or the moon. An insect in the bushes sang backup to _Don’t think I need anything at all._  The cold on the wind pulled Kaz’s coat and Venom’s arm around him.

V said, “He wasn’t afraid to be a piece of the scene.”

The cigar tasted like crushed mint leaves in a cocktail at a Costa Rican bar.

Kaz said, “We kept it together, didn’t we?”

_Hey you, would you help me to carry the stone?_

V said, “Once in CQC practice he got a hit in through my guard.” He pointed with a red finger at the center of his chest, where under the shirt the old scar wasn’t. “Right here. Shocked him so bad the next three rounds he could barely put up a fight.”

“There were a few of them who could knock you down, but none of them would.”

This time it was V’s hand that put the cigar to Kaz’s lips, and he breathed in the scent of the oil that greased his fingers.

_I’ve got electric light._

Kaz nodded forward, and his glasses gave up their grip. They landed in V’s lap, where his softer hand picked them up and tucked them in a pouch to shelter out the night. Right now he didn’t need the extra piece of personal dark. The same night as everyone was enough.

Kaz said, “There once…wait.” He squinted at where the cassette player nested. _Coming through in waves._  “I know this one. _When I was a child, I had a fever…_ ”

He’d never heard V laugh before. It was a rusty and uneven staggering sound, cut with a thud in the middle when he fell onto his back on the ground.

“So that’s why you never sang! That is terrible.”

“Shut up,” he said sharply.

“No.” His arm shot out and pulled Kaz down too. “I love it.”

Kaz’s head ended up resting on his stomach, gazing up at the slow streaks of the stars and the curious face of a goat. It chewed something and sniffed him. Windows in cell doors, Kaz realized, were the shape of a goat’s pupil.

_Who let all this riff raff into the room?_

V’s breath under him made him rise and fall like the ocean under them both.

“Heh.” Kaz pointed at a goat. “Another with spots.”

It was with his right hand, but V saw.

The sky turned about them and the stars shed lines like diamonds cutting their paths in glass.  There weren’t any clouds to hide behind.

_Ooh, no matter how you try._

It was around then, a hundred breaths and rustles of goat’s hooves through the weeds away, that Kaz found the courage to ask if he missed him.

“The ones we lost will always be with us.”

The cigar tasted like the air right before rain. Kaz’s eyes closed. Both of V’s hands rested on him, and the contrast between the cool and the warm stole all the territory of his senses.

Kaz’s voice crept to meet him. “Do you remember his name?”

The breeze rustled, and brought its sharp herbal smell. Kaz’s eyes opened slowly.

“No,” said V, finally. His eye cast over, part hopeful, part afraid. “Do you?”

“Yeah,” Kaz said. “I always will.”

The look in his eye was asking.

In the midst of the music, where only they would hear, Kaz told him.

He closed his eye. His breath was slow, and his brow moved, as though working through a conversation in his mind. It was a long moment before peace settled on it and smoothed the lines away.

“Yeah,” he said softly. “That sounds right.”

 

* * *

 

Kaz’s coat stuck to his lower back when he sat up. The dew had soaked through. The moon was far along in the sky.

Faint with the dying battery, the cassette player was murmuring, _The bleeding hearts and the artists make their stand._

“So that’s why you like that cigar,” Kaz said. The rhythm of his voice sounded strange and new.

“Yeah.” V was stretching his arms above him. “It makes time go away for a while.”

He tucked the fragment of the cigar into one of his pouched, and gave Kaz his sunglasses from another. He got up and reached down to pull Kaz up with him. He picked up his crutch and tilted it in reach.

After he’d called for Pequod and was crouching down for the cassette player, Kaz realized something. His lip twitched.

“You remembered to turn over the tape.”

It must have taken exceptional care to pincer that bit of plastic between his prosthetic hand without crushing it. V looked at him with a quiet and mutual amusement, like they were sharing a secret or talking about an old friend.

“I don’t forget the important things.”


End file.
